Ethical issues in physiology - synthetic biology: Scientific progress or ethical dilemma?

The field of Synthetic Biology brings together physiologists, molecular biologists, physicists, chemists and engineers interested in constructing organisms or systems with novel biological functions in order to better understand life processes.  The present technology allows the creation of animals containing human material by introduction of human genes in replacement of animal ones.  Alternatively, by the mixing of embryonic cells it has been possible to create non-human animal-animal chimera or human-animal chimera.   This field of research has a number of ethical implications and is the focus of the symposium: Synthetic Biology: scientific progress or ethical dilemma?

The timings for this session are as follows